Personal Meaning: How We Give Relational Significance, Relative Importance, Emotional Force, and Moral Value to Our Actions

The personal meaning of our action reveals who we are: understanding how that disclosure is possible enables us to describe our self-awareness more accurately and solve a raft of intellectual puzzles about our values and relationships. Much of our action has personal meaning, meaning others are not entirely privy to. Our relationships can have a great deal of meaning or they can be of little meaning. Some of our actions register as important, others relatively unimportant. Sometimes we act in loving ways; sometimes we act out of fear. Sometimes we mean to do something with special moral value. Personal Meaning accounts for how we construct these features of our actions' meaning. It shows how we make sense of our relationships, our priorities, our emotions, and our morality in ways that can be reasonable or unreasonable. By laying out how we reason when we are being reasonable about personal matters, we discover what author Richard Prust calls the "character logic" of personal meaning. Appreciating its governance gives us two advantages: it lets us describe our lives more accurately than we can using the causal languages of science, and it enables us to find philosophical solutions to the issues discussed under these topics.